Posted
by
timothyon Sunday June 24, 2012 @10:10PM
from the before-civilian-gps-mind-you dept.

jfruh writes "AT&T's video library is a treasure trove of future-looking films from the past, and this one is no exception. Combining what might be the first on-film use of the phrase 'information superhighway' with predictions of Siri-like services and sweet '80s computer graphics, this offers a valuable look at how close we came to our past's future."

But they did manage to include that embarrassing quote "If cars advanced as much as computers." Of course, he neglected to mention the whole part about how "it would randomly stop working, we'd have to restart it, and we'd think it was totally acceptable."

The PC AT was the first machine released which was eventually capable of running Windows and its reset switch is nonexistent, you have to BRS it and the BRS is on the side just like the PC and the PC XT.

Stupid side note to this; The startup screen was a.rle file that was on the install disks. When you ran setup it copied this file, along with the code section and the string file into Win.com. You could do the same with a "copy/b win.bin+win.str+winlogo.rle win.com" from a DOS prompt.

Slightly different technique on win98. IIRC, the screen was actually a.bmp file with the wrong extension, logo.sys. You could also configure it not to boot the GUI at all, and just get the underlying DOS (Windows 9x was indeed, as critics so often claimed, built upon the foundation of DOS-with-a-few-extensions). I did that on one of my laptops to greatly reduce the boot time. You could always just enter the 'win' command to go graphical.

GP mentioned how often they crashed back then, and it did bring up memories of early Windows machines.

I don't remember exactly when the buttons migrated from the back to the front. The red push button at the back though is a very clear memory for me. On that particular computer it could crash quite often if you hit multiple keys on the keyboard at the same time.

Now, I had almost forget about the keys. Normally they are only on rackmount servers these days to lock up t

Early *True* IBM PC-ATs had a really big toggle switch on the side. This is because the very first PC-ATs used an identical form factor to the PC-XT class system chasis, and was pretty much the same, other than the inclusion of an RTC, and a 286. (and able to see significantly more RAM.)

They (AT&T, Xerox, IBM, and multinational companies of similar stature at the time) thought that the global information infrastructure would be centralized, monolithic and closed. Businesses and consumers would have to choose a provider that would provide the whole enchilada.

This was the backdrop for Japan's Fifth Generation project (referenced by the AT&T video around 13:30) and was met with a certain amount of panic in the US at the time.

They (AT&T, Xerox, IBM, and multinational companies of similar stature at the time) thought that the global information infrastructure would be centralized, monolithic and closed. Businesses and consumers would have to choose a provider that would provide the whole enchilada.

Not surprising. They figured "the internet" would be run like cable TV... hell Cable TV providers are still trying to make that happen.

1985 was only 1 year after the Ma Bell breakup and while the Macintosh was out IBM still dominated the PC business. So when you look at this in the context of the times it makes sense that they would think the network and infrastructure would be closed because that was the way things were during the time period. I am glad they aren't like that though I think with AT&T reformed and Apple controlling the whole experiance things might go back to the "Ma Bell" days:(

pdp11's, vax, sun, apollo, and any number of microprocessor based business systems abounded. the PC wasn't so certain in 85. I was able to avoid the wretched things till 88 or so.

Yep. In the home, almost no one had a PC. It was Amiga/ST/C64/Atari 800/Spectrum and the odd Apple II. Business wise, I saw the odd PC but they never really took off until Win 3.x in the big way we now remember.

And most of those were some form of dumb terminal. With the technology of the time, it just made sense - who would want a power-sucking, noisy, expensive, high-maintainence piece of equipment like a computer in their home? It seemed more practical for the service provider to maintain those, and for home users to just have the basic hardware needed to access it remotely and rent what resources they need. And maybe play a few simple single-player games and do the most basic computational tasks like text editi

Of course, as computer scientists we can say with utter certainty that the scare tactics at the end of the film were utterly unnecessary: the claim that countries other than France had Minitel ('video terminals in the home') fell apart rapidly [wikipedia.org], and expert systems and knowledge inference, the messiahs of 80s AI research, utterly failed to amount to anything. Even the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer System flopped due to a lack of market. In retrospect it's obvious that the end of the video was corporate p

Well, for a while in the early 90's it was looking like it would go that way. There were about half a dozen closed services like Compuserve, AOL or Genie with a relatively large number of subscribers each. Thankfully they were quickly overtaken by the open Internet.

I've always found it interesting, how projections get the basic concepts right, but they completely miss on the piratical implementation of things. In TNG everyone caries around a small computing pad, but they seem to keep several of them from different reports and do not have any internal communication systems unless they download from a master main frame

Early on one of the interviews talks about full volumetric holographic displays by the end of the centuries, but ignores the middle ground of real time video transmission on existing displays. And the artistic renderings through out the video's keep displays as simple monochrome 13inch displays, because no one seems to imagine a high resolution color display, but they can predict the need for a network based communication network to transmit idea's.

The basics of the video are valid and a good projection to modern times, but all of the interpretations of how it will be implemented show a limitation based on 1985's existing tech. You see this same limitation in the early 1950/1960's articles on the world of tomorrow.

Exactly. I watched the original Alien again movie the other day and the "mother" room is full with nothing but a million little light bulbs and a tiny monochrome text only display. Not bad for 1979 though.

then again, thank about designing a computer with display that would need to function for decades while everyone was in suspended animation, be rad & temp hardened, be absolutely robust and not fast or fancy. I can't imagine anything BUT a command line system with only sufficient res to make characters

There was a big miss with basic computers as well. It was assumed in many of the classic sci fi books that hard stuff, like calculations, would be done by hand while easy stuff like cleaning the house would be done by robots.

The distressing thing is that this misconception still pervades the teaching of automation. Hardly ever do I see stationary machines doing useful work. Mostly what I see are moving machines engaged in meaningless activity that has no application in the real world, unless you are ta

Are you only referring to household toys, or are we talking robots/machines in general? While I do admit that household robotics is mostly expensive toys (like the roomba) the amount of highly sophisticated and very useful robotics elsewhere is enormous.

It was assumed in many of the classic sci fi books that hard stuff, like calculations, would be done by hand while easy stuff like cleaning the house would be done by robots.

In nearly 100% of these cases, the author was more invested in his success as a writer than his success as a futurist. You found this stuff sitting right beside accounts that were nowhere near this stupid. It's pretty hard to write a convincing story (that men will buy) where doing your own vacuuming helps you get laid.

Not sure if that typo was intentional or not, but you did hit on a big issue. The world of the future they envisioned was also one where they still controlled all content distribution.....They never really thought about the implications of people being able to store and transmit massive video libraries on their own....

Really though, in this movie the things they got right were the things that were already implemented. This was 1985, after all, a lot of people were already passing images over the net. When they started predicting, they went wrong.

That's an excellent point - there seems to be a certain timeframe beyond which futurists fail to consider the implications of progressive implementation. On only slightly shorter timeframes, they can actually do quite well - for example, AT&T had a series of "You Will" ads in 1993 [youtube.com] that were strangely accurate in predicting modern technology. Presumably it has something to do with extending an existing technology in a logical way rather than trying to determine the intermediate uses of new concepts.

One thing stood out for me was that of all the nations discussed as possible competitors to the US, China wasn't even mentioned once. This was made less than 30 years ago. Just goes to show you how quickly the unexpected can happen.

Thats already starting to happen, growth is slowing in China, who copied Japans economy right down to the bad debts. And just as in Japan, as long as the economy was growing fast the debts really didnt matter, but that era is coming to a close. China bulls are in for a rude awakening when they find out that China is, in fact, not made of magical economy elves that prevent the economy from ever shrinking.

This decade will be the decade of the fall of the US dollar, fall of the Euro, fall of the concept of 'social contract' and ever greater rise of the economies that actually produce stuff and those who export energy, raw materials and agriculture products.

China is already the dominant economy in the world today and it will only strengthen that position. Given what the choices are in USA and Europe for the leaders and given the fact what the understanding of economics and history is among the general populat

The key question is whether Japan has as flaky a job base as the US? Yeah, it's tough for new entrants to get jobs, but once in, they don't fear losing it, except for performance related reasons. That, more than anything else, keeps their society stable.

Yes, because they have really tough rules on migrant workers, and really hard ass rules on immigration in particular. If I could pack up today, and move there I would. The real problem though is the job climb, Japan though is suffering from the same issue that Europe is. Too many people entrenched, and everyone entering are stuck in temp jobs.

Actually, Japan's immigration rules are extremely relaxed. For "engineers" (programmers qualify), if you have a degree and a job offer, you're good to go. The new rules even allow a 5 year visa which doesn't necessarily terminate if your job does. If you are a native English speaker (you have to have 12 years of education in the English Language), have a university degree and a job offer, you can teach English. Other categories exist for business owners, etc.

I haven't looked at every country, but I think Japan is probably the easiest country to come and work in the G8. Why are there so few foreigners? Culturally it's hard if you are inflexible and you don't speak Japanese. Even though there are actually quite a few jobs available for English only speakers, Japanese culture is really linked to the language. I don't know how to explain it properly except that there is "inside" and there is "outside". If you only speak English (or Japanese poorly), you will always be "outside". Outside is sometimes kind of nice because nobody has any expectations of you. But similarly, you get few benefits. You're always the hanger on, never part of the in group.

Even without language issues, many people have difficulty because Japan is an intensely moral culture. There are things that are absolutely morally right and absolutely morally wrong. The problem is that these things are often quite different than what is morally right and wrong in the west (especially the US, which is also a very moral culture). People from some certain cultures seem to have a great deal of difficulty dealing with Japanese ways of doing things. Not necessarily a bad thing, but not great if you want to live in Japan:-)

Anyway, if you want to work in Japan, and have a university degree, you can do it. One last issue... The Japanese work system is really different. You get hired after university and you stay at your job forever. It's really hard to get a regular job if you aren't coming right out of school. It's nothing to do with immigration policies -- workers whose companies fold on them suffer too. This is why you get stuck in a "temp" job. It used to be that "temp" workers often got stuck with 1 year visas, which were renewed every march. If a company wanted to get rid of foreign workers, all they had to do was make it known that they didn't want to have the visas renewed and problem solved. But with the new system (starting next week, I think), they can no longer do that. Visas are 5 years and usually extend past the end of the job.

The major downside for having a "temp" job is that usually you don't get paid a quarterly bonus or certain benefits. If you are a programmer, you can often negotiate these details. If you are a teacher, you can't and you will end up getting paid about half of what regular teachers get paid. However, the responsibilities are *much* less, so personally, I can't complain about it.

Anyway, I live in Japan. I'm actually off abroad for a couple of years so that my wife can learn to speak English, but apart from that I'm here permanently. It's my home now. People here are friendly and welcoming of foreigners if you try hard to fit in.

Japan already has severe problems with its demographics and its only going to get worse. They could use the immigration.

China will also get there not too long from now. Their one-child policy simply was too draconian. Stable - slow population growth is good, shrinking population bad, rapidly growing population with not enough resources -- very bad.

Shrinking population is bad in a country like Russia, where you have a huge area, but a shortage of a work force. Russia could really do w/ not just a slow, but even a rapid population growth - spread evenly from Moscow to the Bering Straight. A population of 1 billion could be comfortably fitted in that area.

China, otoh, does have an young enough population (unlike Japan), although I read that they've relaxed the one child policy in a lot of places. But even if China had the Russian problem of a shrin

Parts where made in the UK, US for the mil, people leaving the mil, gov where selling their unique skills....
South Korea, Japan, other parts of SE Asia where all setting up to supply the world as good, safe, cheaper, trusted non communist production zones as needed.
The US got smarter and went one cheaper - China - lol all the way to the bank.
The deal was done under Nixon, it just took a while for the average person to understand role of communist production zones while not liking communist Russia.....
Ja

They've ditched Marxism? What they have is a bastard child of Feudalism and Maoism, where private companies are allowed to do whatever they want, so long as the People's Government is allowed to horn in on whatever % of the action they feel like.

I think you should really look up what Marx really wrote. Hint: It doesn't have that much in common with any of the real live communist regimes. Also what China labels itself and what China really does are not necessarily the same.

The intro actually used the word telecommute when talking about how computers were in the home. Was that a word in common usage at the time? I was only 12 at the time banging out BASIC programs copied from magazines so I wouldn't recall lol.

The Ontario Science Centre in the mid-1970s was wicked cool. The glimpses into the future were all there for you to touch and play with. (The Philips Coffee Machine was one of my favorites). Sadly, science museums have devolved into environmentalism and global warming preaching which by comparison is about as much fun as watching the organic, free-range, fair-trade grass grow.

The Ontario Science Centre in the mid-1970s was wicked cool. The glimpses into the future were all there for you to touch and play with. (The Philips Coffee Machine was one of my favorites). Sadly, science museums have devolved into environmentalism and global warming preaching which by comparison is about as much fun as watching the organic, free-range, fair-trade grass grow.

Check out the Miraikan [jst.go.jp] in Tokyo, or the Exploratorium [exploratorium.edu] in San Francisco to see a Science Museum that doesn't hit you over the head with environmentalism. Just say away from the California Acadmy of Sciences in San Francisco since just about every exhibit in that museum talks about how whatever that exhibit is about is dying because of climate change.

Why? Are you thinking that a technology like this would instantly fit within whatever an Art Director would design as a casing intended to be readable to a television audience?

I really do wonder if anybody who thinks what they see on TV can invalidate a patent has ever seen what goes into making a show. Here's a hint: Nobody on 2001 held a prop that displayed anything like a an LCD screen does.

quality of life was better. Kids actually went outside and played on a regular basis. Physically playing, not 3DS or iPad games... or facebooking each other on the "information superhighway".

They rode bicycles without a helmet -- nanny state hadn't passed mandatory helmet laws for bicycles back then -- and didn't die! And no, 60% of kids weren't obese and didn't have diabetes back then.

Actually, one of my friends in the early 80's fell off his bike and hit his head, and while he didn't die, he ended up spending a few days in the hospital (he was trying to show us how long he could ride a wheelie). He hit his head hard and lost consciousness.... there was a bloody spot under his head. Fortunately this was when neighbors actually knew each other, so the rest of us ran to the nearest neighbor's house (leaving him laying alone on the road!) and she called for help (but not 911 since that pre

I do remember 1985 pretty well and while it is true that some things where "more free" back then, I also do remember a whole bunch of things I'm very happy to have removed from modern living. CFCs, lead paint, asbestos, leaded fuel, no seatbelts, a whole range of cancerous additives in plastic toys, DDT and it's merry friends and many more.
Nanny it may be, but just look up the car accidents to fatality ratio back then and today.
And let us not forget the clothing, that was an eyesore.

They rode bicycles without a helmet -- nanny state hadn't passed mandatory helmet laws for bicycles back then -- and didn't die!

You can drive for many, many years without a seat belt too, until the day you come to a very sudden and brutal stop. Serious head trauma is not a "learning experience" but more of a maiming experience. Cuts, scrapes and bruises, a twisted ankle or a few broken bones are learning experiences and plenty painful enough, generally without the risk of long-term/permanent injury or death. Besides they are going to bang their head in lesser ways, according to my parents I did a good headbutt with the living room t

Company 1 in Europe has an idea for a part and contacts Company 2 in America to produce it:

1) Company 1 googles and finds the name of a company in America to produce the part. They call the American company and it takes two hours to wade through the phone system menus and leave several voice mails and wait for a reply.

2) Company 1 can't give any details without a signed NDA, and because of requirements from the company's lawyers, the NDA has to be faxed over, signed, and faxed back.

3) Once they agree to work together, company 1 wants to send company 2 a copy of the design.3a) The email bounces because it was typed wrong due to international spelling differences3b) Once the email stops bouncing, it is picked up by a spam filter and nobody ever sees it3c) Since the email had a large attachment, microsoft exchange choked and the server admin had to come in on the weekend and rebuild the databases3d) After that, Company 1 decides to just put the file on an internal FTP server.3e) Company 2 isn't able to use FTP in windows without downloading a program from the internet, which involves getting permission from the IT department, registering the program with the developer, convincing the anti-virus software to allow the ftp program to run, etc etc3f) The server at Company 1, an older machine not frequently used, isn't firewalled correctly by an unintelligent cisco firewall product, and fails to correctly open the reverse datastream. The files never arrive, as the connections hang.3g) Company 1 gives up and uses Dropbox.3h) The files arrive at Company 2, but they are also intercepted by some Russian and Chinese hackers that easily evesdropped into their dropbox using a script inserted several months ago to look for interesting keywords.

4) Many months pass, and finally the prototypes are shipped over to Europe, where it is discovered, the Americans did not convert metric units to English units correctly for each portion of the project, and nothing screws together.

5) The hacked data is leaked to the highest paying competitor.

The other futuristic situation, about the doctor, is equally obnoxious these days if you factor in HIPPA, incompatible data formats, and even lower IT standards.

Let's face it, this started off as a great idea and became something quite different.

You are not exactly of the jolly persuasion, are you?
PS: Just to be nitpicking: Windows does include a command line ftp prompt (and has for a while) and with newer versions ftp servers can be mapped directly from the windows explorer. Windows sucks, but not as bad as some would like it to.

Actually AoL was/is a self contained network, so it wasnt really on the internet.
It did provide a gateway to it, and when I was on it in 1993, I found out after a year that it wasnt the internet like I thought. Instead AoL was nothing but a controlled network with a filtered and censored gateway to the real internet.
Then i got a real ISP and enjoyed freedom ever since.

It depends who the OP means by "we". I'm in Australia, and we didn't even get a connection into US ARPAnet until the early 1990s, and it was a satellite connection that served as the only outbound link for the entire country.

I'm in Australia, and we didn't even get a connection into US ARPAnet until the early 1990s,

There were a few connections around, though mostly through business or university mainframes. I remember messaging and playing Empire or Star Trek with one of those green fanfold keyboard consoles in the early '80s, then getting a bit more serious and using the WMC VAX system in the late '80s to explore. From memory, there was an X25 PAD over in Queensland that could hop over to the US.

In the early 80's, Intel was working on the IAPX432 object oriented processor. This was a secure, mainframe class architecture that was quite revolutionary.
Unfortunately, It was also slower then anything else available and was killed. due to industry disinterest, Mostly Intel's
Too bad Intel didn't later revisit that path when the technology allowed this kind of architecture to be implemented to it's full potential.
We would probably be programming in Lisp or Smalltalk now and the web would be a totally different place.
We will probably see ISA extensions that support those ideas in the future.

So it looks like I misfired the tone a little on my post. I was trying to capsule summary a couple of the big intersections in Microsoft's role in consumer computing on the net. Isn't that why MS had a Borg Gates icon for some 12 years? Instead I got a chain of insulting AC's. Oh well.

All I meant was that in 1985 people my age were still playing games on their Commodore 64's, and we weren't aware of any way to get online for years later. 1995 was the iconic year of a new Win95 computer runni

It's simple, this was the distant future brought to you by AT&T Internet where all communications are approved by AT&T and their corporate buddies who pay big bux for the right to have a server. And not to worry, it'll all be done with short haul Frame Relay feeding into long haul SONET. All paid for in your monthly bill from AT&T. All safely in the hands of corporate America.

Yes and they wern't sure how they'd use SONET, the only thing they were sure of was tcp/ip would almost certainly have no place. In 1991 the ITU go the USG to ban any network communications with and for the government in anything but OSI protocols.

Despite the fact they never existed. "they sounded great on paper though!"

It's truly amazing how much tech grew up around end-running the inability of the telecoms companies to do anything even slightly innovative or sensible. Because they couldn't pull their collective heads out of their asses and just implement ISDN in an affordable way, the modem developed from simple frequency shift keying to rather complex signal processing to trick the AtoD converters into encoding 56Kbps digital data onto a 64Kbps digital line passing through analog audio.

The same AT&T that tells Congress that competition among telcos hurts consumers?

Well, they were right from a technical point of view, but not from a cost point of view.

Phone service now is far cheaper than when AT&T was in control of long-distance, and has far more unique providers (Multiple long-distance providers, Skype, Cell Phones, VOIP, etc). But, the quality of phone calls is vastly inferior to what AT&T was selling. Get on a landline, and talk to someone on a landline someday. No dropped calls, no half-second latency that causes one person to talk over the other, etc.

Really? I knew your mobile phone system was fucked up but that Skype is better than landlines in the US is a surprise to me. I live in Europe and I know quite a lot of people who don't use Skype because 'the quality is not good enough.'

I'm not so sure about your statement. Sure a dedicated land line is fine, but it is not really that superior. Even landlines get bundled and concentrated at some point. The more lines you jam into a single upstream the more money you make until at some point the service degrades to much. Skype does needs (some) dedicated bandwidth, a thing tcp/ip was never intended for but it still performs rather well in most cases. I won't even start on cell phones, because thats a whole different ballgame.